Porn inquiry may cost police $60m

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Police face a logistical headache and cost blowout dealing with the downloading of more than 100,000 images on computers seized in NSW during last week's child pornography raids.

A team of 21 NSW police is working around the clock to process the images from more 67 computers but has to pass them on to Commonwealth censors for classification - at a cost police estimate at $600 per image.

Potentially, such a cost could cause a $60 million budget blowout in NSW alone.

Nationally, the cost could be astronomical: so far, 200 men have been charged with downloading more than 2 million images from an eastern European pornography website.

Under the NSW Crimes Act, possession of child pornography refers to possession of a film, publication or computer game classified as "refused classification".

Such a category applies to material that "describes or depicts, in a way that is likely to cause offence to a reasonable adult, a person (whether or not engaged in sexual activity) who is a child under 16 or who looks like a child under 16", according to the act.

For a prosecution to be successful, the Crown would need to prove the material downloaded or published was capable of falling into this category.

A spokesman for the Office of Film and Literature Classification said yesterday that law enforcement agencies are entitled to the first 100 classifications in any year at no charge and a 50 per cent discount on all classifications after that. Classification of a revised "interactive or click-on access film" is $600 per item.

The spokesman said the office did not know how many items it would be expected to deal with. Nor did it know at this stage whether additional or temporary classifiers would be employed to meet the workload.

NSW police have warned that the current round of arrests is simply phase one of Operation Auxin, in which 30 NSW men, including nine teachers, a minister of religion, two police officers and other workers with access to children have been charged with possession of child pornography.

All were caught be using credit card facilities via a site in the US to buy the downloaded images and film clips.

A further 100 cases of downloading child pornography were being investigated, said a spokeswoman for the Police Commissioner, Ken Moroney.

She said members of the first group of alleged offenders were employed in occupations seen as putting children at greatest risk.

"The next group [of approximately 100] in phase two are still seen as high-risk, but as far as our intelligence indicates, they are not in a position of being in contact with children," she said.

The state's commissioner for children and young people, Gillian Calvert, said yesterday almost 200 people were caught last year in the NSW employment screening system aimed at weeding out potential child sex offenders.

Ms Calvert said 81 people had been referred to NSW police for investigation.

A further 106 who had gone through the mandatory screening were rejected by employers from working in jobs with unsupervised access to children.